


Time To Hit The Books

by laziestgirlintown



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Crack, Crack to angst, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Established Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Gen, M/M, Passing mention of past drug use, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-13 05:38:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7964581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laziestgirlintown/pseuds/laziestgirlintown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here be demons. And established Johnlock. And who knows what other fandoms I might drag into it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bookstore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock has made an unexpected but correct deduction and brings John along to Rupert Giles' bookshop.

The bell on the shop door jingled. The man sitting behind the desk reading a large book looked up and pushed his glasses up his nose.

“Oh, hello.”

“Are you the owner?”

The man stood up. “Yes, I'm Rupert Giles.” He laid a pen in the book he'd been reading, keeping his place. “And you're Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, aren't you? I've been reading about your latest case in the papers and wondering whether you'd turn up here.” He turned to the shorter of his two visitors. “And I do regularly enjoy reading your accounts of your adventures, Doctor Watson. Jolly interesting.”

He held out his hand and John shook it, smiling. “Thank you. It's always gratifying meeting a fan.”

“Oh, I'm sure you must meet them all the time, Doctor.” Giles extended his hand towards Sherlock. “I'm a great fan of yours as well, Mr Holmes, or perhaps I should say, an admirer of your methods and skill.”

Sherlock shook his hand with a more peremptory smile. “I suppose I should say thank you, but if you've been reading John's romantic adventure stories you've only a thin grasp of a watered-down version of my methods.”

“Hey,” John warned.

“Oh, I read between the lines, Mr Holmes.”

“Hey!”

“And in addition, it now seems that your methods have led you here, which means they must indeed be as efficient as I had assumed, though I would dearly have hoped that the facts had _not_ led you here, pleased though I am to see you both, because that will mean … that it is likely as bad as I feared.”

“Which is how bad, exactly, Mr Giles?” Sherlock demanded.

“You have a demon lose in London.”

John burst out laughing and started turning to Sherlock. “Oh dear, did you hear that, Sherlock, we have a …”

Then he saw the look on Sherlock's face as the detective sat down on the bookstore owner's desk.

“Damn,” Sherlock simply said. “Right. What can you tell us?”

“I'll just put the kettle on, shall I?” Giles said after a glance at John. “This will take a while. Assam alright with both of you? Good.”

He disappeared behind a curtain, and under the sound of water being poured, John stepped up to Sherlock and hissed,

“Why the hell are you playing along? If you let me in on these things beforehand I can play encourage-the-loony as well, you know, it generally works better as a team effort –“

“If I'd told you my suspicions you'd have thought I was the loony,” Sherlock answered, his voice resigned, but his face and posture collecting themselves to face whatever came next. “And I hoped until just now that for once I was wrong.”

“Well, it wouldn't be 'for once', you know.” John, genuinely worried now, put his hand on Sherlock's neck, winding a few stray dark locks around his index finger.

“Thanks ever so much,” Sherlock tried to growl, but his heart wasn't really in it. And he didn't move away from the touch. John waited a few moments, then said, voice even lower,

“Can you tell me what's really going on here, then? Or can you at least nod to say you'll tell me when we get home?”

He felt Sherlock's neck begin to move under his hand but his heart fell when Sherlock simply turned his head to look up at him.

“It is just that, I'm afraid, John. I eliminated the impossible and there it was. Demons are real.”

John involuntarily – mostly – tightened his grip. “No, no. Demons are, in fact, impossible, Sherlock, what on earth led you to –“

“Not on Earth,” Giles said, reappearing from behind the curtain with a tray laden with teapot, cups, milk, sugar, and biscuits. “Or rather, not _from_ Earth, from one of the Hell dimensions, but currently on Earth, which is crux of the problem. The biscuits have almonds, I hope nobody's allergic?” He skilfully found a place for the tray on the overladen desk. “We do try to keep these things on a need-to-know basis. Public panic and all that. I know it's disorienting to find out about.”

John chose one thing at random to reply to. “We? Who's 'we'?”

“The Watchers' Council,” Sherlock said, and John nearly pulled his hair, then simultaneously realised that he still had his hand on Sherlock's neck and remembered that Sherlock didn't like public displays of affection, so he locked his hands in fists behind his back, settled into at-ease stance and said, 

“What?” in the tone of an order.

“Ah, well,” Giles said, “then I'm afraid the information you did manage to find was rather outdated. The Watchers' Council was in fact mostly blown up and murdered several years ago. We're working now to replace it with something more functional, and also not quite as run by stuffy old men.”

“So 'we' now is more, what?” Sherlock asked, back to business. “Anyone who knows about … this?”

“Well, the core people are primarily slayers, witches, vampires and various other beings generally considered mythical, but, broadly speaking, yes.”

The only thing stopping John from going home, putting the kettle on, drawing a bath and then sinking into the tub with a cup of tea and a large whisky very close at hand was that he couldn't understand what game Sherlock was playing here, and how he was expected to help. He started going over the case in his mind, from the very first skinned body found in an alley – no, there was a skinned urban fox before that, and they'd hypothesised that it tied in – while he also tried to listen to Sherlock's conversation with the loony, who was now pouring the tea.

John decided to definitely not touch his tea, especially after Sherlock sipped his and said:

“More background information will certainly be useful later, but for now, if I'm correct, we are running on a tight schedule. I need to know the specifics of the demon we're facing here and now.”

“I concur. It operates according to an integer sequence which doesn't quite follow mathematical rules but which does form a pattern. The killings, and the methods of the killings, will be increasing, not exponentially but according to a predistinguished curve nonetheless. What speaks in our favour is that the pattern also binds the demon to certain conditions. From what I've read in the papers –“

“We have, of course, kept a lot out of the papers,” Sherlock interrupted and John gaped at him, before quickly shutting his mouth. That is exactly the sort of thing you do not say to a loony suspect, even if they're probably already paranoid enough to assume it!

Granted, he didn't know if Mr Giles was a suspect; at least for this particular crime. He did feel fairly firmly ensconced in his delusions – which Sherlock were still encouraging. They were now deep into a discussion about integer sequences, the loony bookseller fetching several ancient tomes and opening them on top of each other, pointing out the pertinent passages and diagrams. Sherlock checked the title and publication data on each book, and wrote things down in his own notebook, which made John feel a little better, but he was still … playing along. Rather too well, John thought glumly. He sat down in a chair by the desk, glancing dejectedly at the books, and wondered when he would understand what was going on.

Sherlock noticed the movement and turned his head – his gaze first that of a predator bird, but that immediately melted into the look of a concerned Sherlock.

“John.” He crouched down and pressed a teacup into John's hands. John met his eyes miserably. “I will explain the deductions and research that led up to this, I promise,” Sherlock said, his voice earnest and urgent, “but right now I _really_ need to understand the time table we're subject to.”

Oh. That might be it. The killer was a loony of the same kind as Mr Giles, working from the same set of made-up mythology. That would explain …

“John,” Sherlock said again, and John focused on his detective. “I'd really like you here with me, if you'd just … Ah.” Sherlock looked down, took a very deep breath, and looked up again, holding John's eyes with his own. He forced the next words out. “Why … why don't you call Mycroft. Tell him where we are. Would you do that?”

John felt a warm calm developing in the deepest parts of him. Finally. He smiled at Sherlock and nodded. Through the rushing in his ears he couldn't remember just how quietly Sherlock had said that, but the bookseller was at the back of the store, fetching more books.

John went to the front of the shop, a corner by the window, where he could see both the street and Sherlock and Mr Giles, and took out his phone. He dialled the number he only dialled when Sherlock was missing, when Sherlock was dangerously high (very, very long ago, now, that), when Sherlock was in true danger. The phone picked up after one signal.

“Ah, Doctor Watson, how lovely to hear your voice.”

“I haven't said anything yet.”

“And now you have. Such an elegant paradox.”

“Look, just shut up, Mycroft,” John whispered fiercely. “Things are going very weirdly here and I think we need your help. We're at a bookshop called Logos Books and Sherlock is questioning the owner about the skinner case. But the thing is, he isn't questioning so much as …”

“Have they determined what species of demon we are dealing with?” Mycroft interrupted tersely.

“Oh for fuck's sake!” John shouted out. Sherlock and Giles turned to stare at him so he held out the phone and yelled so all three of the bloody loonies could hear him: “Is it fucking April Fool's? Is it? Because the last time I checked it was August and I'm also not fucking ten years old –“

“Sherlock?” said Mycroft through the phone.

“Yes,” Sherlock sighed with the sigh exclusively reserved for his brother.

“I'm sending two people over who, in conference with Mr Giles, might hope to swiftly prove the improbable to Doctor Watson so you can get a damned leg on in solving this damned case already. Code word Bronze. Alright?”

“Fine,” Sherlock snapped, in a tone that would have been harsher if not for his worried look towards John.

“Things had better make sense within an hour,” John growled into his phone, “or I'm manhandling Sherlock out of here and not letting him out of the flat until every last trace of pixie dust has been thoroughly purged from his system.”

 

An hour later, John was on his sixth or seventh cup of tea with Ginny Potter and Anathema Device.

“So that's the crash course for muggles, is it?” He took another biscuit. It had chocolate in it. That was nice.

“We usually do a weekend,” Anathema said. “Really turn people into turnips properly.”

“With a quidditch match at the end, to cheer them up again,” Ginny added. “But yeah, that's the superintense version.”

“Mostly because, as we understand it, Sherlock needs you there.”

“And, apparently, both he and Mycroft assume you can handle it.”

“So if you're okay, I need to get some bells, books and candles,” Anathema said and stood up. “I should also check to make sure the watcherlibrarian knows what he's doing.” She went back out into the shop.

“You actually are okay, aren't you,” Ginny said with a smile.

John looked up from his tea and managed a faint smile of his own. “I'm gonna kill him for this, but yeah, for the moment I'm a version of okay.” He narrowed his eyes but his smile grew a little. “There's incredibly much more to this that you haven't told me about, isn't there?”

“Oh yes, loads and loads! But you asked for the one-hour version.”

“Are there dragons and unicorns and things?”

Ginny frowned at him as if he was having her on, but then her face lit up again. “Right! Muggle. Yes, yes, of course there are. My brother Charlie's a dragon keeper! I think you'd get on with him, actually.”

“How about, I don't know, hobbits?”

“Well,” Ginny said, holding up a finger, only to be interrupted by Sherlock bellowing from the front of the bookstore:

“If you're quite done chatting over tea, John, I need you out here!”

John's smile changed and he went to wash and put away his teacup. “Duty calls, then. Thank you for taking the time to come and tell me all this.”

“No problem, it's always funny to find out the things muggles don't know about! I don't know how we keep this up, to be honest.”

“Well, let's hope this …” he made a face, “… _demon_ doesn't play a part in changing that. It sounds like it would be much nicer if the first thing the rest of us found out about was the Quidditch World Cup or something.”

“That was actually very nearly discovered this year,” Ginny told him as she washed her cup with a flick of her wand and they left the small kitchen at the back of the bookshop. “By some muggles playing Pokémon Go. They were so focused they blundered right through the distraction spells. So now my brothers Ron and George are working with Hagrid and some muggle-borns to make a wizarding version of Pokémon –“

“If we could focus for now on catching the real, actual monster, perhaps?” Giles said drily from his desk, where he, Anathema and Sherlock stood around mountains of open books.

“Right, yes, that. Catching the real, actual monster,” John said, squaring his shoulders and setting his jaw.

“I'll owl you later, John, yeah?” Ginny said, on her way out of the shop. “About hobbits and pokémons and things.”

“Oh, right. Thank you. I'll look forward to it.” The bell on the shop door jingled and John turned to his detective, the watcher-librarian, and the witch. “So. How do we stop this demon?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (The books never made me ship Ginny/Harry, but frombluetored's series [It's Tea Time](http://archiveofourown.org/series/538465) managed, so there you go.)


	2. Demon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are demons. John and Sherlock find out there's a discrepancy between theory and practice.
> 
> PTSD cw for this chapter.

It turned out that John was better than Sherlock at stopping demons.

Sherlock quickly studied up on the internal logic of this, their brand new branch of investigation. He put the pertinent questions to their new guide in the supernatural, librarian and bookseller Rupert Giles; he parsed the key points of information from the books Giles provided; he drew the correct conclusions and memorised, meticulously, all the details of how to find, bind and banish this particular kind of homicidal demon. He did all the research he could do in the short time they had, and, being Sherlock Holmes, with the aid of Rupert Giles, that was a lot of research. Between the two of them, they had all the facts needed.

But John had the war.

Sitting in the cosy bookstore full of leather bound volumes, with a pot of tea always within reach, it never occurred to John that that was where this was heading. He listened while Sherlock and Giles went through all the facts, the lore, the research. He kept notes, as much for himself as for the eventual write-up. He knew, intellectually, when an arrow of hazel would wound, when a dagger of lead would defend, when nearly unpronounceable words would have effect. He was coming to accept the fact of magic, found he was more or less okay with it, and was settled in to be the backup.

But then, in a rain-chilled midnight alley, the demon took a step towards Sherlock, and John went back to the war.

Magic, even rather terrifying magic, done by friendly witches in a cosy bookstore was one thing. A demon was another thing entirely.

It was much too big. As if London were a toy town, a corner of a child’s playing mat, and the demon was the older brother walking into the nursery to sneer at children’s games and throw his football down on the toy soldiers, if he didn’t decide to just lift the entire mat to scatter the toys across the room. 

It towered over the roofs. Dwarfed the church spire two blocks away. Its horns nudged the moon wreathed in dirty clouds.

Still, with John at one side and Giles at the other, Sherlock pronounced the words of the ritual correctly. Or so John had been sure. But the demon waved a hand - let’s call it a hand, please - and the arrow of hazel shattered into splinters.

And then it took a step towards Sherlock, and John moved.

In the simple, clear thoughts of war, John saw in a glimpse that it was all bluster. If you can, in battle, of course you’d make the other believe you’re that big. But I see your claws reflected in that pool of petrol-stained rainwater. I hear the echoes of our four bodies between these crumbling brick walls, and you’re no more Godzilla than I am.

And even if you were, you don’t get to do that.

The demon had taken a step towards Sherlock and so John drew his arrow of hazel and dagger of lead and stepped in between them. The bottomless eyes turned to him and an icy despair was dragged from the pit of John’s stomach, turning the marrow of his bones into barbed needles. But that was just war. He knew how to do that.

John planted his feet and his hands and voice were steady as he bound and banished the demon.

***

There was much less aftermath than usual. Sherlock sent off a text to Lestrade simply saying the case was closed. While John stood perfectly still, only his head but mostly eyes moving, waiting to see if anything else were to move in the shadows, Giles and Sherlock exchanged words John didn’t quite hear; and then he was in a taxi cab with Sherlock, lights flashing by, and then he was in Baker Street, going up the stairs. Before he quite knew it, he was sitting on the sofa and there was a mug of tea in his hands.

Slowing down, he registered it piece by piece. Heat. Rounded mug. Scent of sweetened lemon tea. No jacket or shoes, but blanket over shoulders.

“Thanks.”

His voice felt unused. Wrong in this room. As if it had been decades since he had spoken. Or as if the last time he spoke … 

“John?”

John didn’t answer and Sherlock sat down on the floor in front of him, falling into his point of view, which roused John momentarily.

“Sherlock?”

“You saved dimensional existence as we know it, as far as I understand.”

John shrugged. The tea mug was scorching. The heat burnt his skin. It didn’t reach the torn, ragged marrow of his hands or even the brittle bones surrounding it; bones of the hands that had held the arrow of hazel, the dagger of lead.

“And I’m almost entirely certain you saved my life.”

Sherlock’s deep, quiet voice jolted him like waking from a dream of falling. Some scalding tea sloshed and John put the mug down on the floor, between his feet and Sherlock’s folded legs.

“That was the point,” he said, almost soundlessly.

One of Sherlock’s huge hands wound round his ankle, spreading long fingers reassuringly up his calf beneath his trousers, letting him know they were alive, safe, together, at home.

***

Panic woke John in the middle of the night. A detached, faraway part of him thought he might be sitting up but he’d been thrashing about in the darkness and wasn’t certain what was up or down; he couldn’t breathe for his heart kicking him in the ribs and trying to choke him, and he thought he’d gone blind, the dark was so splintered. He grabbed the mattress but the room still swung wildly, stopping only to tilt again.

He’d forgotten what it was like. That’s how long it had been. His body started panicking again at the fear of the panic. But something else had changed in those years, too, and Sherlock was awake before he was. Familiar scents finally reached him. A well-known, if frightened, heartbeat. The familiar voice.

“John. John. You’re home. You’re in Baker Street. John. You’re home. Everything is … well.” Sherlock’s hands moved over his arms, his back, his chest, as he babbled, trying to sound calm: “Everything isn’t back to normal, exactly. Because, well, now we know there are demons and witches and all sorts of -”

John shook his head without opening his eyes, grasping for the breaths his body wanted to deny him. Sherlock shut up and kept touching him without holding him, leaving him an escape route, murmuring safe nonsense words, just wanting him to know - 

“Home?” John rasped, and Sherlock melted and repeated immediately:

“Baker Street. Home.”

“Home.”

“Home.”

***

John finally drew a shuddering breath and Sherlock realised that he, too, had started shaking. He’d done his best, for his own part, to try to delete the demon. Not the practical facts of how to banish it, obviously, but the memories of that looming presence - that tug that wanted to unravel everything that held everything in its place, that touch that could grab reality only to pull it disdainfully into swirling chaos … 

But then the fact of John: stepping out in front of it, stance easy, staring down Hell, sending it packing, saving Sherlock by being John. Again. And saving the world, but less matter.

John, paying for it in years eaten up as if they’d never passed, never healed.

Sherlock pressed the palm of his hand onto John’s. Not holding him fast, but giving him something to hold fast to. Wishing he knew whether it was the right thing to do, when John’s fingers responded slightly he immediately but gently enclosed John’s grasping hand within his own, trying not to think how ridiculously much larger his own hand was. He went to redeem that discrepancy by kissing John’s face so very lightly. Brushing his lips against John’s eyebrows, his temples, his jawline.

Lips against skin, Sherlock began murmuring to John about everything they’d done for years and years and years, between the horror of war and this new horror. The chair before the fireplace that became John’s chair. John’s recounts of their adventures. The bed that became theirs. John’s warm hand on Sherlock’s shoulder, back, hair; Sherlock sometimes forgetting to reply even with a smile or a look. 

“And then I found out there were demons. And I realise now that … ” 

Sherlock stopped and lowered his voice, moving even closer to John.

“I thought it was just one more thing,” he murmured. “Just a new kind of murderer. And I was counting on you to do the same without even asking you.”

“You don’t need to ask me.” John’s head against his. Shared body warmth. Hand in hand. Pulse still much too high, breathing irregular and strained, but lying still. (Mostly. A few twitches.)

“John. You went up against a demon and sent it back to Hell.”

“Can never put that in the blog.”

“You can start a new blog.“

John huffed out a laugh, the exhausted, relieved laugh of someone who was drowning and now has an oar, however waterlogged, to cling onto.

“No, I mean it,” Sherlock suddenly knew, laying them down and stretching out, shifting them about so John could use him as a whole body pillow, bodies touching at as many points as possible. His heart was slowing down from the fear but speeding up with the much more regular beat of the excitement of a new idea, and he willed John’s heart to follow it, supported by his hands slowly stroking John’s back, hips, shoulders.

“An anonymous blog. You’d have to set it in an anonymous city. Not use any of your overused clichés. Add some Americanisms. The odd Australian or African turn of phrase.”

“Perhaps some Scots?” John murmured, finally approaching the threshold between panic and sleep again.

“Don’t change the subject,” Sherlock said, immediately distracted.

“All right,” John mumbled, rolling his “r” once. His body settled into a shape perfectly fitted to having Sherlock for a mattress. Eventually, he fell asleep in Sherlock’s arms, to the sound of Sherlock’s voice inventing imaginary streets in the imaginary cities of his next, anonymous, blog.


End file.
